In Corporate Blog Copywriting, Remember – If They Don’t “Get” Annie, They Might Not Get Out Their Checkbooks

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 “Annie Get Your Checkbook”, the title of an Indianapolis Star feature article last month, reminded me of something blog content writers need to keep in mind when it comes to using pop culture references.

The newspaper story was about an auction at which 100 or so items that had once belonged to 1880’s sharpshooter Annie Oakley would be up for sale.  I “got” the title, which was alluding to the movie and Broadway show “Annie Get Your Gun.” As a girl of around 5 or 6, I remember my father buying me a recording of the song “Buttons and Bows”, which I would play over and over again (shows you how old I am!).

But, as a professional ghost blogger and corporate blogging trainer, I had to wonder – how many readers today would “get it”? Readers might find it just as easy for many to think of Orphan Annie and the show “Annie”, I realized. “Use pop culture references sparingly,” cautions Joanne Brooks of Helium.com, offering two main reasons why:

  • You want your work to have relevance several years from now.
     
  • Pop culture references can delay reading and cause you to lose your audience.
     

My own observation, based on working with Say It For You blogging clients from many different industries and professions, is that it’s a challenge to find the precise style of communication that will best connect with target readers. (While this is especially true in business-to-consumer blog content writing, even with suppliers and distributors, you want to avoid anything that is a barrier to understanding.)  “Huh?” is hardly the reaction blog content writers aim to elicit in readers of any SEO marketing blog.
 

To be fair, newspaper readers are a different breed from today’s online searchers:

  • Demographically (I like that term better than the phrase “older”) we’d be more likely to understand the fifty-year-old reference
     
  • In the way we process headlines (we don’t “click away” that quickly).

The point I want to stress to business owners and freelance content writers in Indianapolis is simply this: The clearer the words in the title are to the searcher, the easier it will be for them to engage, navigate, and transact.

In corporate blog copy writing, it’s a simple equation: If they don’t “get” Annie, they might never get their checkbooks!

 


 

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Freelance Blog Content Writers in Indiana – Meet Julio!

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“Meet Julio:
College student
Speaks Spanish
Loves espresso”

Online sampling company uSamp uses survey panelists for market research. The eight words shown above, taken from the company’s ad in American Marketing Magazine, deliver a powerful message. Freelance blog content writers need to keep that message in mind when composing content for business owners’ and professional practitioners’ blogs. Knowing your reader goes well beyond mere demographics.

“Smart marketers know there are many subsets of every group targeted; not every message will work on every person,” cautions entrepreneur.com. Smart writers of SEO marketing blogs know that, too. At Say It For You, we realize online searchers need to know we’re thinking of them as individuals and that we understand their problems and wishes, not merely their stats.

The Julio example is a perfect illustration. Blog content writing needs to go beyond the facts.  Julio is, in fact, a Spanish-speaking college student. But the detail about the espresso? Now you’re talking – to him!

There’s an even broader point to be emphasized based on this ad, and it’s one for not only the corporate blog writers, but for the business owners and professional practitioners who hire those copy writers. Blog writing is not the be-all and end-all of marketing.  It’s a tactic, an important piece of what is hopefully a larger strategy for the marketing of a business or practice.

The old conundrum from college philosophy class about the tree falling in a forest comes to mind.  There may be blog content writing, there may be calls to action, but if the writing is not targeted towards the right buyers, there will be little business accomplished. Three directives from Darren Rowse, editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips, are de rigeur for business bloggers:

  • Define your target readers
  • Identify where and how they gather
  • Provide useful content, delivered in the appropriate way

As a corporate blogging trainer, I concur. Your research may tell you where to find Julio – at the college Spanish club.  But if you want Julio to find you, start with some interesting information about espresso!

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Long Tail, B-to-C Indianapolis Blog Content Writers

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“Investing in SEO means you’re probably optimizing for long-tail search,” according to Hubspot.com.

Thankfully for most non-techie Indianapolis blog content writers, the next two sentences in Hubspot’s white paper are less cryptic: “A long tail search term is long, usually containing three or more terms.  And the longer a key word is, the more specific it gets.”

As a professional ghost blogger and corporate blogging trainer, I felt quite “validated” by Hubspot’s advice to business owners:

“If you do little else with your SEO other than blog utilizing keywords important
to your business, you’ll see significant gains.”

Validation of the Say It For You emphasis on high quality writing (including using correct grammar and spelling and properly attributing quoted material to the original authors) comes from no less a source than Google itself:

“Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites”, said Google employee Wysz (quoted by Erik Deckers in “Why Your Blog Needs to be Well Written”).

For blog content writers in Indianapolis who want to create SEO marketing blog material, but lack the resources to implement a full optimization program, using long tail search terms in blog posts is good start.
 

In Hubspot’s example, there is a marketing company that wants to draw traffic to its website..  Were the freelance blog content writer for that company to use only the search term “marketing”, that is so broad a category that it would be extremely difficult for that small company to “get found” online among the millions of providers, worldwide, that offer all manner of marketing services.

Just by adding a second element to the keyword phrase, the business blog writing – and the search- become much more focused: “Marketing analytics consultant”.  The content writer has narrowed the field to analytics consultants, and the chances of that site getting found have been tremendously increased.

Hubspot adds a third term to its illustration: Boston. The two “tail extensions” make the keyword phrase " marketing analytics consultant in Boston" very specific.  By narrowing the target audience, the writer would have increased the odds of the site getting found.

And this is precisely the point at which questions frequently arise in my Say It For You corporate blogging training sessions. What if my goal is to attract business throughout the Midwest, not merely in Indianapolis? Well, nothing stops you from alternating long tail, localized search terms or even using several in one blog post, such as “Carmel, Indiana HVAC”, “Heating and Air Conditioning in Greenwood, Indiana”.  Hubspot adds that local search terms appeal to mobile searchers, who are closer to the point of purchase.

So, is SEO trumped by skilled blogging for business? Not in the least, warns Hubspot. “Constant quality content creation will get you far, but it will only get you so far.”

In the meanwhile, for those of our business owner and professional practitioner clients on a limited budget, our long tail, B-to-C Indianapolis blog content writers will keep bloggin’ along!

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Giving Business Blog Readers Something to Do With their Hands

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I imagine that for film directors, same as for us business blog content writers, finding ways to engage the audience is the Holy Grail.

The other day, though, sitting in a dark movie theater looking at a blank screen and clapping my hands as part of the reverberating applause, I gained a whole new understanding of what the word “engaging” means.

Regular readers of this Say It For You blog are used it by now:  As a corporate blogging trainer, I’m always looking for ideas for blog content in unlikely places – ads posted in bathroom stalls, book, magazines, billboards, speeches, even eavesdropped conversation snatches.  To me, it’s all content fodder to use for the benefit of those who’ve turned to me for assistance with business blogging.

But, really, that particular Saturday morning, I thought I was there just for the movies…

Several dozen of us Heartland Film Festival Society members had been invited to breakfast and a special showing of four award-winning short films.  The films were spectacular, each one deserving of the name Truly Moving Picture.

My favorite of the four, the one that made me want to get out my cell phone and summon every blog content writer in Indianapolis to “get over here – now!” was “The Butterfly Circus”.  Here’s how the reviewer summed it up: “A limbless man in a carnival sideshow encounters an infamous circus showman and is inspired to hope against everything he has ever believed.”

Afterwards, I reflected on the fact that we, the people sitting in the Legacy Landmark Theatre 4, were very much like blog readers.  What corporate blogging does best, I’ve often remarked, is deliver the kind of customers to a business website who are already interested in the product or services that website is touting.  Obviously, all of us Society members already had an interest in art film.  But then what?  In any SEO marketing blog strategy, something needs to happen next.

The standard answer for writers providing blogging services to others is that what’s next is the Call to Action.  In the couple of weeks since I saw “The Butterfly Circus”, I’ve been thinking a lot about CTAs, about what happens when Calls to Action are just not there, and what’s often missing when they are.

Once the basic connection has been established through the blog post title and some attention-getting statement of statistic, we blog content writers have our real work cut out for us – creating the emotional connection with readers.  According to the Content Marketing Institute, you must “use emotions to engage the brain.  It doesn’t matter how well-written your content is if readers aren’t emotionally involved in what you have to say.”

The twenty-minute film had ended.  With no live performers in sight and just a blank screen in front of us, all forty of us in the audience burst into applause.  We needed to do something to express all that emotion the film had evoked in us, and no one was giving us an outlet.

That, in short, is the big insight I wanted to share with freelance blog content writers.  The only thing worse than a lame Call to Action is NO Call to Action. 

Give your blog content readers something to do with their hands – and the positive emotions your content has produced.

 

 

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Beyond Bad Grammar in Corporate Website and Blog Content Writing

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As a corporate blogging trainer in Indianapolis, my favorite recommendation to business owners and the freelance blog content writers they hire to help bring their message to their customers is simply this:

Dress your blog in its best. Prevent blog content writing “wardrobe malfunctions” such as grammar errors, run-on sentences, and spelling errors. I counter any observation that most readers won’t catch any errors with this simple question:

 “Can you afford to have even one potential customer noticing your lack of care?”

But as I continue to read hundreds of pages of business blogs and corporate websites each week (a prerequisite for anyone providing business blogging assistance or writing content for websites), I’m noticing something that goes far beyond bad grammar and even beyond lack of care.  I’m finding content on blogs and on websites that’s at least partially incomprehensible.

Here are just four of the many instances of online content I found difficult or impossible to understand. I’ve reproduced each of these paragraphs word for word as they appeared on their respective sites.

 

  1. Supplemental cause to speak over inside using a taxes lawyer is the usefulness it creates.  Not merely might interacting stipulations with an IRS adviser turn into neurologically worrying, yet.
     
  2. Wonderful jewelries.  They were so gorgeous and classy too.  I love those jewelries which is so unique with its design.  Choose best jewelry boxes to secure such amazing jewelries.
     
  3. Despite of being subject to constant ailing condition, Billy Graham managed to serve the U.S. President in the bestest form. It is just like as if he was ready for this small meeting and after it was regrettably over, Obama made his way to West Virginia to offer his condolences and express his views on the loss of those unfortunate 29 miners, who got killed in a coal mine explosion on April 5th.
     
  4. Blogs vary in quality. There are blogs that you can easily label as poorly written immediately after a short glance while other blogs are simply so good that take your breath away. On the other hand, there are those blogs that are good but seem far away to being great – blogs that simply can’t rise from mediocrity.

(This last example is particularly sad, since the subject of the paragraph is poorly written blogs! “Far away to being great”? “So good that take your breath away?”  All I can say is “Huh?”)

I confess that when I began to come across incomprehensible online content, my first “take” was that it must have been created by non-native speakers of the English language. Business owners or professional practitioners had needed content writing help, I concluded, and had chosen to outsource the work overseas to save on costs.

When I learned about “spinned content”, I realized that the “gibberish” effect in some of the incomprehensible text I was finding could well be the work of a computer program, not of some overseas content writer.

Spinned content is reproduced by replacing words with synonyms, for the purpose of re-using content (and repeating keyword phrases) many times with an eye to “winning search”.  As SEO Positive explains, “Since the spinning software cannot discern context or meaning, there is a higher possibility of reconstructing the article into something meaningless.”

Now I have two questions to pose to business owners and professional practitioners:

            “Can you afford to have potential customers noticing your lack of care?”

            “Can you afford to have gibberish associated with your brand?”

 

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